I remember sitting across from a senior government official in the Gulf, about six weeks into a major transformation programme. On paper, everything was moving. The governance framework was in place. The workstream leads had been assigned. The project plan had been reviewed and signed off. The first steering committee had gone smoothly.

And yet nothing was actually happening.

Not because of incompetence. Not because of a lack of resources. Not because the methodology was flawed. The team I was working with was experienced, capable, and well-intentioned. But they had arrived with a delivery model built for a different context, and they were applying it with the confidence of people who had never had reason to question it.

That pattern is playing out at an extraordinary scale right now. Saudi Arabia’s ICT market surpassed $48 billion in 2024, the largest technology market in the Middle East. McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI in GCC Countries report, drawing on surveys of senior GCC executives, found that 84% of GCC organisations have adopted AI in at least one business function, and only 31% have successfully scaled or fully deployed across the organisation. That is a 53-percentage-point gap between starting and delivering, across some of the best-funded, most ambitious transformation programmes in the world.

The question is not why organisations in the region are investing. The question is why so much of that investment stalls between intention and outcome.

After more than a decade delivering in the Middle East, I think I know the answer. And it is not the one most people reach for.

 

The Assumption That Travels Badly

Western delivery frameworks, whether PRINCE2, PMI, SAFe, or the various proprietary methodologies that large consulting firms carry from engagement to engagement, are not neutral tools. They are cultural artefacts. They were built in specific organisational contexts, shaped by particular assumptions about how decisions get made, how accountability flows, how disagreement is handled, and what progress looks like.

Those assumptions are rarely stated explicitly. They do not need to be, in the environments where these frameworks were designed. Everyone in the room already shares them. But the moment you move those frameworks into a fundamentally different cultural context, the unstated assumptions become the problem.

Hofstede’s cultural dimensions research (now maintained by The Culture Factor Group) offers a useful lens here. Arab countries consistently score high on two dimensions that bear directly on programme delivery. The first is power distance: the degree to which authority is respected rather than openly challenged, and the degree to which the most senior voice shapes the room rather than the most technically accurate one. The second is uncertainty avoidance: a preference for predictability, a resistance to ambiguity, and a reluctance to surface risk that might destabilise a process already formally endorsed. These are not character flaws or cultural limitations. They are consistent patterns that predict specific delivery behaviours imported frameworks are simply not designed to manage.

The typical Western delivery model assumes a relatively flat decision-making structure where the person with the most relevant expertise speaks most loudly. It assumes that challenge and disagreement in a meeting are signs of healthy engagement rather than disrespect. It assumes that formal sign-off is the meaningful moment of commitment and that what is agreed in the room will be actioned after it. It assumes that timelines create accountability and that accountability creates action.

In the Middle East, several of those assumptions do not hold. And the teams that arrive without understanding this do not fail because they lack capability. They fail because they are solving the wrong problem.

 

What Actually Drives Delivery in This Region

Execution in this region is not primarily operational. It is relational.

This is not a cultural curiosity or a soft consideration to be acknowledged in a pre-departure briefing and then set aside. It is a delivery requirement. Understanding it, genuinely understanding it rather than paying lip service to it, is the difference between a programme that moves and one that generates activity without progress.

Decisions in many Middle Eastern organisations, particularly in government and quasi-government entities which dominate the regional landscape, do not flow through the formal governance structure in the way a Western framework assumes. The steering committee may ratify decisions, but the real alignment happens elsewhere. In relationships that have been built over time, in conversations that take place outside the formal meeting structure, in the space between hierarchy and trust that no project plan captures.

Hierarchy here is not an obstacle to navigate around. It is the delivery infrastructure. Understanding who the real decision-makers are, what they care about, how they receive information, and what kind of relationship needs to exist before they will move is not supplementary to the delivery approach. It is the delivery approach.

Equally, the pace at which genuine commitment forms is different. A Western programme manager reads a signed-off plan as a committed baseline. In many regional contexts, that same sign-off is closer to the beginning of a conversation than the end of one. Real commitment, the kind that produces action, is built through repeated engagement, demonstrated respect, and a track record of following through. It cannot be manufactured by a governance process, however well designed.

 

The Meeting That Agrees to Everything and Changes Nothing

One of the most consistent patterns I encounter when stepping into stalled programmes in the region is what I have come to think of as performative alignment. The meetings happen. The presentations are well received. The heads nod. The action items are recorded. And then the follow-through does not come, not because anyone has decided not to cooperate, but because the alignment that appeared to exist in the room was not the deep kind that produces action.

In high-context cultures, of which many in the Middle East are clear examples, direct disagreement in a formal meeting setting carries a social cost that most Western delivery professionals underestimate. Saying no to a proposal in front of a room of peers and seniors is not simply a professional difference of opinion. It can feel like a breach of the respect and harmony that the meeting is partly there to maintain.

The result is that concerns, reservations, and genuine blockers often do not surface in formal governance forums. They emerge later, in quieter conversations, or they do not emerge at all. The experienced regional delivery leader learns to read what is not being said in a meeting as carefully as what is. The silence after a proposal is not always agreement. The smooth meeting is not always a sign of progress.

Teams that do not understand this dynamic spend months wondering why a programme that looked aligned keeps stalling. The answer is usually that the alignment they measured was the visible kind, and what drives delivery here is the invisible kind.

 

Where International Teams Get It Wrong

The failure mode I see most consistently is not incompetence or arrogance, although both exist. It is the application of a known model to an unknown context, with too much confidence and too little curiosity.

The international team arrives. They bring the framework, the templates, the governance structure, the reporting cadence. They run the kickoff. They establish the workstreams. They hold the first set of meetings. Everything looks like it is moving. The client counterparts are polite, engaged, and apparently aligned.

Then the programme slows. Decisions that should take days take weeks. Approvals that seemed close keep getting deferred. Stakeholders who appeared committed become harder to reach. The team escalates. They add more governance. More reporting. More pressure. The programme slows further.

What they are experiencing is the consequence of building delivery infrastructure without first building relational foundations. They have a governance model without trust underneath it, and governance without trust is just paperwork.

The other common failure is treating local counterparts as recipients of the methodology rather than as partners in understanding the context. The best people in any regional organisation carry an understanding of how things actually work, who the real influencers are, where the genuine blockers sit, and what has been tried before and why it did not land. Engaging that knowledge seriously, rather than as a courtesy, would transform the delivery approach. Most international teams access about ten percent of it.

 

What to Do Instead

The answer is not to abandon rigour or to conclude that structured delivery does not work in the region. It does. But it works differently, and the sequence matters enormously.

The first investment, before the governance framework, before the project plan, before the first steering committee, is in relationships. Not networking in the transactional sense. Genuine relationship-building, rooted in curiosity and respect, that creates the conditions under which honest conversation becomes possible. In a region where trust precedes transaction rather than following it, the time spent on this is not a delay to delivery. It is the foundation of it.

The second shift is in how decisions are understood and pursued. Rather than designing a governance structure and expecting decisions to flow through it, the experienced regional programme leader maps the real decision-making landscape. Who are the individuals whose genuine endorsement will move things? What do they need to see, hear, or feel before that endorsement becomes real? What informal conversations need to happen before the formal ones? Answering those questions honestly, and building a relationship strategy around them, is more valuable than any governance framework.

The third adjustment is in how alignment is tested. Rather than reading smooth meetings and nodding heads as confirmation of commitment, effective regional delivery leaders build in deliberate mechanisms for surfacing the real picture. Private conversations with key counterparts after formal sessions. Trusted intermediaries who can carry honest feedback in both directions. An explicit understanding that the formal meeting is often where positions are displayed rather than where they are formed.

Fourth, the pace of delivery needs to be calibrated to the pace at which genuine alignment forms, not the pace that the project plan demands. This is uncomfortable for Western programme managers trained to treat a timeline as a commitment. But the cost of false pace, the appearance of movement without the substance of it, is far higher than the cost of taking the time to build the real thing.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, local knowledge must be treated as a strategic asset rather than a logistical courtesy. The people who understand the organisation, the culture, the history of what has been attempted before, and the unwritten rules that govern how things actually get done are the most valuable resource on the programme. Structuring the delivery approach around that knowledge, rather than around the imported framework, is the shift that most changes outcomes.

 

The Deeper Lesson

Delivering in the Middle East has taught me something that has made me a better programme leader everywhere, not just in the region.

Context is not a complicating factor. It is the medium through which all delivery happens. Every organisation has its own version of the unwritten rules, the informal power structures, the historical sensitivities, and the cultural patterns that shape how work actually gets done. The Middle East makes these visible in ways that Western environments sometimes obscure, because the gap between the imported model and the local reality is large enough that you cannot ignore it.

But the principle is universal. The best delivery professionals I have worked with anywhere in the world are the ones who arrive with curiosity before they arrive with answers. Who treat understanding the environment as the first act of delivery, not a preliminary to it. Who know that a framework is a starting point, not a solution.

The frameworks that travel well are not the ones with the most sophisticated methodology. They are the ones held lightly enough to be adapted, by people self-aware enough to know when adaptation is what the moment requires.

 

A Final Thought

If you are leading a programme in the Middle East and it has the shape of movement without the substance of it, the instinct will be to add more structure, more governance, more reporting, more pressure. That instinct is usually wrong.

The question to ask instead is simpler and harder. Do the people who need to move this programme forward trust you enough to tell you what is actually in the way? Have you built the relationships that make honest conversation possible? Do you understand not just the governance landscape but the human one?

If the answer to any of those questions is uncertain, that is where the work is. Not in the framework. Not in the plan.